The largest national park in the U.S. — bigger than Switzerland — with massive glaciers, volcanic peaks, and the historic Kennecott copper mine ghost town.
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- Summer
Wrangell-St. Elias is the largest national park in the United States — bigger than Switzerland — protecting massive glaciers, volcanic peaks, and the genuinely fascinating historic Kennecott copper mine ghost town. Despite its enormous size, most visitors experience only a small corner of it around McCarthy and Kennecott, since the rest is largely trail-less wilderness.
Getting there involves a long, rough gravel road, which naturally filters out casual day-trippers and keeps the area feeling genuinely remote even by Alaska standards.
Touring the historic Kennecott copper mine, a remarkably preserved early-20th-century ghost town, is the park's signature and most accessible activity, with guided tours available through the mill building. The Root Glacier Trail offers a relatively easy hike right up to (and in season, onto, with proper gear) a genuine glacier.
For a broader view of the park's scale, a flightseeing tour over the surrounding peaks and glaciers shows off terrain that's otherwise essentially inaccessible on foot.
The town of Chitina, at the start of the McCarthy Road, offers basic services and is a natural staging point before the drive in.
